yet one could be implemented right from the franchise canon.
the deuterium reserve.
have if refil through movement making the ships bussard collectors and furion reactors an upgradable & customisable component, & drain through whatever drains your subsystems.
Actually the really funny thing to me is that their already is atleast two already in the game they don't use.
1) Subsystem energy, weapons used to actually drain the subsystem. This could have been extended to AUX power for using space magic and/or shields when they are being beaten on or magically healed.
2) Crew but yeah let us not touch that with a 50ft pole.
Think if you had a 1% chance to get a debuff that gave -1 weapon power each time you fire a weapon. Extend that to using other abilities and say 1% chance to loose 1 shield power each 'tic' of regeneration. These power penalties could only be removed by exploding or being out of combat for a period of time.
That would be a crude system but it would atleast allow for an eventual attrition.
*edit addon*
An auto shield distrubtion would be the biggest improvement to the game I can think of ever happening. It would drastically reduce the gap between the average STO player and those of use who bother to make a keybind. Might also make the other two teams have a purpose in PvE.
I'm being 100% serious this game is so casual friendly for 98% of it then throws players into an ESTF where they explode in seconds in their cruiser while I fall asleep tanking the tac cube by mashing spacebar. Imagine how frustrating that must be for the new player who has no desire to put the time and effort into the game to learn the systems and just wants to play and have fun.
Their is absolutely no resource mechanic. That means either damage > healing OR damage < healing. And when healing also increases EHP that just turns it into a mess.
Well, we will not have a resource mechanic that is exhaustable but the windows for kills could be stretched out to fall somewhere in between all of the available cooldowns.
Reducing the binary feeling of yo-yo spike and healing that we have, would go a long way.
Maybe it wouldn't be a perfect system, but I don't think we need to aim for perfect.
Well, we will not have a resource mechanic that is exhaustable but the windows for kills could be stretched out to fall somewhere in between all of the available cooldowns.
Reducing the binary feeling of yo-yo spike and healing that we have, would go a long way.
Maybe it wouldn't be a perfect system, but I don't think we need to aim for perfect.
As you have stated already though your main window is 5 seconds. The second is oh wait EPtS can be up 100% of the time, 30 seconds for APO windows etc etc but that doesn't even begin to touch RSP, FBP, TSS, extends, etc etc etc. Then you have to worry about the team/player who doesn't stack 10 forms of defense compared to those who do and yeah.
Good luck with that.
The only two states PvP has ever been in, well ok three.
1) Spike or Go Home
2) Fed ball murdering anything that gets close. DPS > healing at that point.
3) Exploitable thing that gets patched (or not) like those banned in the 'have fun' tornies.
Three years of tweaks and it is still the same. Their is a reason most games have a limited resource of some sort beyond just cool downs. STO removed that resources without doing a single thing to compensate for it.
Would that be a good solution to some of the binary nature of kills?
I believe we've had the binary/yo-yo discussions in the past, and my beef then (even more so now) is just about the extremes of it. There needs to be some play there in regard to it, it allows for the actual gameplay and for one to "express" their skill/twitch/ability/knowledge - etc, etc, etc. Something along the lines of watching fencing, boxing, martial arts - there's that play that takes place. STO's more like watching anime.
No matter what it still comes back to the simple problem.
Their is absolutely no resource mechanic. That means either damage > healing OR damage < healing. And when healing also increases EHP that just turns it into a mess.
It will always be a yo-yo that yo-yo can be tweaked but it cannot be fixed without a resource that can be exhausted. You need 'mana' that can be exhausted.
Star Trek is not a simple Fantasy MMO. And it needs more than just the typical 'mana' that most games have.
No matter what it still comes back to the simple problem.
2) DPS is too high and everyone dies in 30 seconds or less.
30 seconds or less is a problem but it's not the only problem. No matter what new mechanic you put in the game be it new power levels, shields levels, or weapon DPS / burst; there will ways be a 30 seconds or less problem as long as they are putting new level 50 people in the same pvp queue as a 3 year vet. However currently I do not think there are enough PvPers to fill a multi-tier queue.
Reasonable TTK (time-to-kill) values are sort of hard to discuss in our game vs. in abstract game design. Realistically, the important thing is that players feel they have agency in their own survival or lack thereof - if I get bursted from 100 to 0 in a short duration, I need to feel that I made a mistake (either in build, loadout, or mechanical execution). The feeling of getting outplayed is important - it means there's something I can change in my approach to the situation to avoid that unfavorable outcome in the future.
In terms of abstract, ideal TTK values? For PvP in MMOs, that sweet spot is usually in the 20 sec - 2 min range, depending on the class and skill loadout matchup and the abilities used by either participant. A sitting duck totally failing to mitigate incoming damage in any way may die faster than that, but they would soon learn not to be a sitting duck and not to fail to mitigate damage. TTK for PCs has to be substantially longer than TTK for NPCs (many of whom need to die in under 20 seconds for the PCs defeating them to feel accomplishment).
It's a complex problem that's not fully solved within the industry, but those are my general thoughts on the situation. As a tangent to answer one of your later questions, the prolonged match times of 45 mins - 3 hours are a big problem for accessibility of the game to new players, but they're potentially core aspects to what the current PvP players enjoy, so any change to that would be considered risky and approached very carefully.
Please don't take this post as advocating for any changes or announcing anything other than my own, personal, inner thoughts on what makes PvP tick in MMORPGs. Just trying to have some real talk - if this post gets misconstrued and twisted to fit agendas, I'll have to avoid talking theorycraft and design with you guys in the future (in this abstract sense), and that would suck - so please don't do that.
I'm gonna go back to the Dev's post about the TTK "sweet-spot" and touch on my thoughts of how PvP in STO is: we are all thinking of the traditional "sword and sorcery" type game mechanic, and how it relates to PvP in STO. As I have experienced PvP in STO, I started out on the same line of thinking, but now, in reflection, I see it more as a "Counterstrike" or "Call of Duty" type PvP, allowing for "headshots" (1-hit kills) and sustained firepower to wear an opponent down, and finish them off.
As I say this, I don't have a vast amount of experience in FPS PvPs, as I truly suck at FPS, and PvP in general in other games, but I understand the mechanics of it all, having watched a number of my friend who excel at those styles of gameplay, and think of the healing that is delivered as a "med kit" or "field bandage", so on and so forth, that can be used on an individual, be it yourself or a teammate.
These games have 1-hit kills and death/defeat within a short period of time for a reason: they are usually quick matches that achieve a certain goal (Kill more than you are killed, capture the base/flag, etc.), and in such a fast paced combat, death is going to come quickly. One friend plays "World of Tanks", and he has more often than not been able to fire on an opponent and kill them with only one or two shots fired.
Spike damage in STO can be applied very quickly, and very brutally, but also the spike healing and damage resists that are available can turn the tides of a battle by creating a near invulnerable team that simply have to wear down an opposing team with little more than FAW and DEM supported with buffs. I wonder about an all FAW, DEM & FBP x 5 cruisers w/ Tac pilots all cross healing each other. Even with the BO limitations that would be imposed on the cruisers, I am sure that with enough coordination, the healing would be just enough to protect all five for almost everything that could be thrown at them, and then it become a matter of NEEDING extreme spike damage in the hopes of breaking the cycle to even stand a chance of winning against them. (The above setup is purely speculative. Any resemblance to real setups, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The above setup is a copyright of Deadpool Inc., and may not be used without express permission of the almighty Deadpool himself. )
Overall, I think that extreme spike damage is needed to counterbalance the spike healing, or to overcome the high amounts of damage resists that are available with skill setting/consoles/abilities, but as with a team that specs straight into resists so that it minimizes the damage that can be done to them, while sacrificing very little on offensive capability, spike damage can be manipulated so that it defeats opponents who are unprepared, which then throws a necessary mechanic into a negative light (don't even get me started on third party programs that can make both setups close to automatic).
One thing that I have always found humorous is number of "nerf damage" threads that show up, but seldom do you see threads about "nerf resists". I can put out a lot of spike damage, especially when fully buffed, and a couple of spacebar presses can deliver anywhere from 30k-75k (depending on if the gods are smiling on me), but when I get into matches where after attacking three different opponents for almost a minute with every available TAC buff running, and I look and see that my total damage is under 20k, then everyone on the opposing side has stacked resists, and there really is no point in playing, as they have damage completely nerfed even before buffs and BO resists are applied. As much as there is wrong/an issue with spike damage, there is also a problem with resist stacking with items and gear that would also need to be addressed, to keep from a situation where damage is lowered all around, and create truly invincible opponents.
Long post.....sorry for my rambling. Though a couple quick thoughts that occurred to me after reading adjudicatorhawk's post.
The downside it it becomes less twitch-gameplay and more passive, which is something not everyone will like.
Playing cat and mouse like Kirk and Khan did in that nebula sounds fun, but in reality it'd be like 2 cloaked BoPs fighting each other..... massively frustrating.
Also you need to take into consideration how long the fight lasts.... Long drawn out space battles are boring.....
Star Wars Galaxies had a wound system (not the wounds we have now). A certain percentage of damage taken in combat was permanent and unhealable, reducing your max hp until healed. The longer you were in combat you eventually had to go heal those wounds. I think something like that would help in STO. It would create a way for pressure damage to serve a use. Even if the 'permanent' damage was fixed at death.
We have something very similar just not in PvP. Ship injuries should take place in combat just as they do on Elite mode or Elite STFs. I believe this will help against stalemates with 2 heal heavy teams or individuals. The ship injuries shouldn't be insta healed but should take 2-3 minutes out of combat to fix. If you are killed then you respawn with no injuries to your ship.
I support somthing like this.
*In PvP the ship injuries should take place during combat and not at death (as in PvE).
*Injuries should only be fixable when out of combat. Not sure if it should be the standard way to fix injuries or maybe using Doffs assignments.
*Unlike above, injuries should stay on ship after respawn. That way you can't just kill yourself to fix all you injuries.
I'm not sure I like the idea of automatic shield distribution as it currently works a la TT.
But a mechanic that causes automatic shield distribution to be a potential tactical liability would be very interesting. The game sort of does this now, but I don't think it does it in the way I'd like to see.
Say you're taking damage on the front shield. Assume that in order to reinforce that shield, you have to weaken the right and left (power comes from adjacent shields). Now when they weaken, they would draw power away from the rear shield. Since the rear shield is feeding two shields instead of one, it would deplete faster.
Currently, I believe shield redistribution draws power from all of the other shields equally. There's no "balancing flow" that I'm aware of. I could be mistaken.
Where this gets interesting is when more than one shield facing is getting hit at about the same time.
If the front and right shields are hit, the system needs to be smart enough to know that it can't drain the right shields to feed the front. Instead, the front shield would siphon more energy from the left and the right shield would siphon more energy from the rear.
If the front and rear shields are hit, each of them would siphon off a share from the right and left shields, depleting them faster.
If you managed to hit the front, right, and left shields all at once, it could create a cascading effect that siphons a lot of energy from the rear shield in order to strengthen the other three.
The idea here is to bring shield melting tactics into play where you're trying to target specific shields to make the ship's shield allocation work against it and soften a particular shield through shield distribution and force a shield to deplete faster than it can be regenerated.
The problem with any kind of automatic shield distribution is that it works against the idea that I can choose which shield ought to be reinforced. It's passively reactive instead of proactive.
Shield resistance also seems like more of an all-or-nothing mechanic. You either have it or you don't. There's no sense that a stronger shield provides more resistance than a weak shield or that a weak shield permits more bleedthrough.
It's a tough problem. I don't envy the Devs the task of making it both more challenging for the veterans and more accessible to less-experienced PvP'ers.
My views may not represent those of Cryptic Studios or Perfect World Entertainment. You can file a "forums and website" support ticket here Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
...it seems one of the big problems with sto combat is the fact that shields via tac team are just too good - so we could either
a) remove automatic distribution - but this would make spike damage even more powerful
b) increase the base redistribution rate per press of 'redistribute' - thus making tac team less needed for all ships
c) give all teams auto redistribution - balance by saturation
d) reassign distrubution to the other teams and take it off tac team to make auto distribution more viable to more builds - simultaneously oblitering the shield tank component most escorts utillise
e) drastically lower the auto redistribution rate so instead of the 'four sides=one side', its more limited to two
or
f) an idea that occured to me - give ships a hybrid aux/power power based auto redistribution rate (why both? to defeat the power of the a2b granting 125 shield for a long uptime) but on top of this; bring a 'stun' mechanism to the party via torpedos
Currently, due to distributed shields torpedos are pretty weak, barely able to hit hull - thus how about we put that massive kinetic energy to use and make it have a secondary use as a auto-redistribute stun of half second per torp? thus with auto-redistribute taken off tac team and powered by aux/shield, theres a viable way to have a decent 'time to kill' - and a;phas cannot truely benefit as the slow speed of the torp versus energy weapons means the energy damage will hit and be partially redistibuted before the stun incurred
in this manner, cruisers and such will be able to inflinct meaningful damage yet attackers will retain an alpha capability
It's kind of inherent to the topic itself though, no? Expectations on how long somebody should be able to last - how long it should take to pop somebody - etc, etc, etc. It's about having a frame of reference for the discussion.
It goes to what Hawk said about the reasonable TTK. The reasonable TTK for a fighter is much different than a starship, imho. Some people will not see that as the case, itho. [...]
To me, it's not reasonable that players get blown up as if they were NPCs while in starships. If they were in fighters, sure - they're in fighters. The expectation of survival is going to be less, again imho.
So it's just that, the reasonable TTK/survival being based on players being in starships - some of them having thousands of crew, if their survival was only a few seconds - neither side would ever launch the ships.
The Freelancer server that I play on kind of does this, with much simpler overall systems. In a slugger match between 2 ships of the same class, it only takes a couple of minutes for one of them to drain the opponent's reserves. If they dont go toe-to-toe directly, and do things like break off to let shields recharge, then the fight will drag out for a much longer time. Fighter combat typically stretches out a lot longer than capital class combat, because fighters can break out of combat much easier.
Bringing it back on subject, the first question that has to be answered is if we (or rather, they) want a run-and-gun game like COD or a deeper combat game like MechWarrior. What we have now is something with the complexity of the latter but with fights that feel like the former. Right now all kills are spray-and-pray and headshots, no attrition at all. I would much rather play a mechwarrior kind of game [not talking about the newer MW MMOs] where you pound on a subsystem or force it to overheat etc. Freelancer lets you blow the engines and guns off the ship, so over time even if you dont kill them directly you can eventually stop them from running and fighting, and then kill them.
STO is nothing like that. STO is a SP PVE game with some MP PVP made available. The numbers reflect it.
My suggestion is for an arena pvp where if someone kills themselves in order simply to heal themselves then kill for opposite team... Also injuries cleared on death will mean that the opponents will still have their injuries which means less chance of completely 1 sided matches in that the team losing would have less injuries to deal with.
Think of a PvP vet that can kill 3 or 4 people before he/she gets enough injuries to be removed from combat. So they let themselves be killed and are back in the fight in 30 seconds, just to kill another 3 or 4 and repeat. Versus, them having to step back from the fight and heal their injuries for a minute or two before getting back in the fight. Giving the other team a change to get caught up.
However I do not like the whole respawn system anyway.
STO already has a system that's supposed to track a sort of "combat fatigue" between deaths: the status of the crew left on your ship. Think about it: in normal combat, your crew is slowly disabled/killed off; although disabled crew can be slowly recovered while in red alert, dead crew cannot, ensuring that there's permanent "fatigue" as long as you're in combat. In addition, most abilities that damage crew today are of the "kill X% or Y number of your crew, whichever is lesser", meaning that high crew pools correspond to higher endurance in combat; this corresponds nicely to the stereotypes of how long the different types of ships are supposed to remain alive in combat.
Unfortunately, crew right now isn't so important to PvP because of how little it actually contributes to combat. Merely adding a bonus to hull regeneration and subsystem repair time isn't usually worth the trouble of slotting biofunction monitors and emergency force fields in place of other consoles. Your crew effectively becomes nothing more than a bunch of redshirts that aren't necessary for the functioning of your ship.
Why don't we revamp the crew mechanic in STO to provide this "combat fatigue" we're looking for? Tying crew levels in to combat performance would provide an excellent way of enforcing "combat endurance", as well as resurrecting a heretofore neglected mechanic. Here's what I'd suggest:
Crew levels are directly tied into the combat performance of your ship. When your crew gets disabled or is killed off, you will feel the impact on your ship. These are examples of how this penalty could be implemented:
Crew acts as a multiplier for the damage and healing put out by your ship.
When your crew is all active (crew is all white), you hit and heal for 100% of your normal values.
When your crew is all disabled (crew is all orange), your damage and healing is cut by 50%.
When your crew is all dead (crew is all black), you are nearly crippled and only hit/heal for 25% of your normal values.
(Of course, there's a sliding scale between these values. e.g. if 1/2 of the crew bar is white, 1/4 of the crew bar is orange, and 1/4 of the crew bar is black, then you'd be operating at 50% * 100% + 25% * 50% + 25% * 25% = 68.75% effectiveness.)
Crew acts as a multiplier for the power levels of your ship.
When your crew is all active, your power levels function at 100% of your normal values.
When your crew is all disabled, your effective power levels are cut in half.
When your crew is all dead, your effective power levels are only 25% of what they normally are.
This would leave projectile weapons and aux-independent heals open as options, while also tying shield regeneration and ship speed in to crew levels.
On respawn, your crew is completely healthy and ready to go. (Alternatively, your crew is like they were when you died; however, if you died by using Abandon Ship, then your crew is completely recovered.)
Projectile and energy weapons now both have a chance to disable/kill crew on the target ship; this chance is "X% chance to kill Y% or Z number of crew on the target ship, whichever is lesser". Projectile weapons have a significantly higher chance than energy weapons, and hitting exposed hull increases this chance for both projectile and energy weapons.
Emergency Force Fields continue their current behavior of providing crew death/disable resist.
Biofunction Monitors now serve to more quickly restore disabled crew to active status. They, however, cannot raise crew members from the dead.
Crew values for ships would be looked over, but the general trend will still be that cruisers get the most crew, escorts get the least, with science ships somewhere in the middle.
Theta Radiation would be reworked so that it's not a crew instakill method.
(There are probably a few other things I forgot to mention here, but you get the gist of how this crew revamp would work.)
If we implement combat endurance/fatigue via the crew mechanic like this, what do we get? Lots of good things!
First and foremost, there's a very clear way to see how your combat performance is affected as you continue in combat. Crew status is already a part of the ship health UI; you can get a sense of how well you're doing at a glance, instead of having to hover over injury icons and remember what each of them does.
This mechanic encourages people to take pauses from combat and escape red alert. Because dead crew can only be revived when out of red alert, people will have to actively break combat instead of just slugging it out forever; if they don't, they'll be operating at lower efficiency.
This mechanic also encourages players to avoid taking damage during combat, even if they can't exit red alert. When players are taking damage, their crew will become disabled far faster than they'll be killed; if they manage to not be focused for a while, they're disabled crew will eventually be restored to active status, restoring some of their performance even if they don't exit red alert.
This mechanic also gives higher endurance to the ships that are supposed to be the better tanks and the masters of long-duration combat:
Cruisers and other ships with high crew pools will be able to stay at peak performance in combat far longer than escorts and other ships with tiny crew numbers; their combat style will usually be to stay in the thick of it and keep pressure on the enemies to capitalize on the fact that they can keep going while others can't.
Escorts and other ships with small crew pools will see their combat performance drop much faster. This will enforce a hit-and-run combat style for the escorts, going in for the hit and then retreating to recover disabled/dead crew.
Of course, because low-crew ships are usually far more maneuverable than high-crew ships, this can lead to interesting combat tactics: a pair of escorts can tag-team a cruiser, keeping the cruiser in red alert while they swap in and out of combat, slowly wearing down the cruiser while keeping themselves at high effectiveness.
This mechanic improves the incentive for cross-healing and support. When a player is the subject of focused fire, his crew will be rapidly disabled and more slowly killed, reducing his own healing effectiveness and causing him to rely more on heals from his teammates. Of course, if the enemy team decides to fire on a different target, his disabled crew will recover and he'll be able to support his teammates.
Because projectile weapons would have a significantly higher chance to disable/kill, this will give them more value and encourage people to run torpedoes/mines more.
This provides a definite "pressure damage" mechanic that everyone in a team can contribute to; because it's proc-based and not related to how much damage an attack is actually doing, hitting more often is valued more than hitting harder, and the crew deaths sustained from these attacks cannot be recovered while in combat.
It also makes sense from an RP perspective. Your crew is actually necessary for the proper functioning of your ship; while minor injuries can be healed while the ship is in combat, more serious injuries will have to wait until the fighting is over to be treated.
I really think that tying crew in to effectiveness would provide a great combat endurance system, one that's easy to see and understand while in combat while providing interesting tactical opportunities and strategies to exploit. Plus, it would rescue a long-neglected mechanic and make it function prominently in the the ebb and flow of battles.
I'm not sure I like the idea of automatic shield distribution as it currently works a la TT.
But a mechanic that causes automatic shield distribution to be a potential tactical liability would be very interesting. The game sort of does this now, but I don't think it does it in the way I'd like to see.
Say you're taking damage on the front shield. Assume that in order to reinforce that shield, you have to weaken the right and left (power comes from adjacent shields). Now when they weaken, they would draw power away from the rear shield. Since the rear shield is feeding two shields instead of one, it would deplete faster.
Currently, I believe shield redistribution draws power from all of the other shields equally. There's no "balancing flow" that I'm aware of. I could be mistaken.
Where this gets interesting is when more than one shield facing is getting hit at about the same time.
If the front and right shields are hit, the system needs to be smart enough to know that it can't drain the right shields to feed the front. Instead, the front shield would siphon more energy from the left and the right shield would siphon more energy from the rear.
If the front and rear shields are hit, each of them would siphon off a share from the right and left shields, depleting them faster.
If you managed to hit the front, right, and left shields all at once, it could create a cascading effect that siphons a lot of energy from the rear shield in order to strengthen the other three.
The idea here is to bring shield melting tactics into play where you're trying to target specific shields to make the ship's shield allocation work against it and soften a particular shield through shield distribution and force a shield to deplete faster than it can be regenerated.
The problem with any kind of automatic shield distribution is that it works against the idea that I can choose which shield ought to be reinforced. It's passively reactive instead of proactive.
Shield resistance also seems like more of an all-or-nothing mechanic. You either have it or you don't. There's no sense that a stronger shield provides more resistance than a weak shield or that a weak shield permits more bleedthrough.
It's a tough problem. I don't envy the Devs the task of making it both more challenging for the veterans and more accessible to less-experienced PvP'ers.
I'd want the ability to shut such a mechanism off too. I prefer to fly nimble ships and I will often distribute shields to a side facing I'm going to bank toward. The time I most want an auto distribute (ie TT) when flying strait into a high damage volley(s).
Not to be a smart TRIBBLE, but don't a lot of people bind distribute shields to space bar?
Imo, the issue w/the live by the sword die by the sword spike builds is more that the dieing part doesn't happen enough for ships that should be more fragile. Getting into the why's would probably derail more than it should.
[Zone] Dack@****: cowards can't take a fed 1 on 1 crinckley cowards Hahahaha you smell like flowers
Random Quote from Kerrat
"Sumlobus@****: your mums eat Iced Targ Poo"
C&H Fed banter
Note the "supposed to", deokkent; right now, crew is both useless and broken. It's useless because it's broken (and because it provides far too small of a benefit); it stays broken because it's not terribly useful to fix. That's what my whole post was about, making it more useful and thereby resurrecting a long-neglected mechanic. :P
Note the "supposed to", deokkent; right now, crew is both useless and broken. It's useless because it's broken (and because it provides far too small of a benefit); it stays broken because it's not terribly useful to fix. That's what my whole post was about, making it more useful and thereby resurrecting a long-neglected mechanic. :P
I'm still trying to figure out how Lesser means Greater with the crew loss that they do...
...and hey, they haven't neglected crew!
Bio-Molecular Torps! They came up with new and interesting ways to get rid of crew.
You guys are throwing out a ton of detailed and complex ideas, and it's really interesting to read through them all. A little advice - whenever you're thinking "What if this mechanic were like this other mechanic instead?", you should also think of a one-sentence response to the question "Why would we make that change?" - while being as thorough in your consideration of the effects of that change as possible. Focus less on specifics of "what to change to fix a thing" and more on "this thing should be changed and here's why" and you'll find your suggestions stay as in-touch as possible with the core of the game.
Jeff "Adjudicator Hawk" Hamilton
Systems Designer - Cryptic Studios
Twitter: @JeffAHamilton
Comments
Actually the really funny thing to me is that their already is atleast two already in the game they don't use.
1) Subsystem energy, weapons used to actually drain the subsystem. This could have been extended to AUX power for using space magic and/or shields when they are being beaten on or magically healed.
2) Crew but yeah let us not touch that with a 50ft pole.
Think if you had a 1% chance to get a debuff that gave -1 weapon power each time you fire a weapon. Extend that to using other abilities and say 1% chance to loose 1 shield power each 'tic' of regeneration. These power penalties could only be removed by exploding or being out of combat for a period of time.
That would be a crude system but it would atleast allow for an eventual attrition.
*edit addon*
An auto shield distrubtion would be the biggest improvement to the game I can think of ever happening. It would drastically reduce the gap between the average STO player and those of use who bother to make a keybind. Might also make the other two teams have a purpose in PvE.
I'm being 100% serious this game is so casual friendly for 98% of it then throws players into an ESTF where they explode in seconds in their cruiser while I fall asleep tanking the tac cube by mashing spacebar. Imagine how frustrating that must be for the new player who has no desire to put the time and effort into the game to learn the systems and just wants to play and have fun.
Well, we will not have a resource mechanic that is exhaustable but the windows for kills could be stretched out to fall somewhere in between all of the available cooldowns.
Reducing the binary feeling of yo-yo spike and healing that we have, would go a long way.
Maybe it wouldn't be a perfect system, but I don't think we need to aim for perfect.
As you have stated already though your main window is 5 seconds. The second is oh wait EPtS can be up 100% of the time, 30 seconds for APO windows etc etc but that doesn't even begin to touch RSP, FBP, TSS, extends, etc etc etc. Then you have to worry about the team/player who doesn't stack 10 forms of defense compared to those who do and yeah.
Good luck with that.
The only two states PvP has ever been in, well ok three.
1) Spike or Go Home
2) Fed ball murdering anything that gets close. DPS > healing at that point.
3) Exploitable thing that gets patched (or not) like those banned in the 'have fun' tornies.
Three years of tweaks and it is still the same. Their is a reason most games have a limited resource of some sort beyond just cool downs. STO removed that resources without doing a single thing to compensate for it.
I believe we've had the binary/yo-yo discussions in the past, and my beef then (even more so now) is just about the extremes of it. There needs to be some play there in regard to it, it allows for the actual gameplay and for one to "express" their skill/twitch/ability/knowledge - etc, etc, etc. Something along the lines of watching fencing, boxing, martial arts - there's that play that takes place. STO's more like watching anime.
Star Trek is not a simple Fantasy MMO. And it needs more than just the typical 'mana' that most games have.
30 seconds or less is a problem but it's not the only problem. No matter what new mechanic you put in the game be it new power levels, shields levels, or weapon DPS / burst; there will ways be a 30 seconds or less problem as long as they are putting new level 50 people in the same pvp queue as a 3 year vet. However currently I do not think there are enough PvPers to fill a multi-tier queue.
I'm gonna go back to the Dev's post about the TTK "sweet-spot" and touch on my thoughts of how PvP in STO is: we are all thinking of the traditional "sword and sorcery" type game mechanic, and how it relates to PvP in STO. As I have experienced PvP in STO, I started out on the same line of thinking, but now, in reflection, I see it more as a "Counterstrike" or "Call of Duty" type PvP, allowing for "headshots" (1-hit kills) and sustained firepower to wear an opponent down, and finish them off.
As I say this, I don't have a vast amount of experience in FPS PvPs, as I truly suck at FPS, and PvP in general in other games, but I understand the mechanics of it all, having watched a number of my friend who excel at those styles of gameplay, and think of the healing that is delivered as a "med kit" or "field bandage", so on and so forth, that can be used on an individual, be it yourself or a teammate.
These games have 1-hit kills and death/defeat within a short period of time for a reason: they are usually quick matches that achieve a certain goal (Kill more than you are killed, capture the base/flag, etc.), and in such a fast paced combat, death is going to come quickly. One friend plays "World of Tanks", and he has more often than not been able to fire on an opponent and kill them with only one or two shots fired.
Spike damage in STO can be applied very quickly, and very brutally, but also the spike healing and damage resists that are available can turn the tides of a battle by creating a near invulnerable team that simply have to wear down an opposing team with little more than FAW and DEM supported with buffs. I wonder about an all FAW, DEM & FBP x 5 cruisers w/ Tac pilots all cross healing each other. Even with the BO limitations that would be imposed on the cruisers, I am sure that with enough coordination, the healing would be just enough to protect all five for almost everything that could be thrown at them, and then it become a matter of NEEDING extreme spike damage in the hopes of breaking the cycle to even stand a chance of winning against them. (The above setup is purely speculative. Any resemblance to real setups, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The above setup is a copyright of Deadpool Inc., and may not be used without express permission of the almighty Deadpool himself. )
Overall, I think that extreme spike damage is needed to counterbalance the spike healing, or to overcome the high amounts of damage resists that are available with skill setting/consoles/abilities, but as with a team that specs straight into resists so that it minimizes the damage that can be done to them, while sacrificing very little on offensive capability, spike damage can be manipulated so that it defeats opponents who are unprepared, which then throws a necessary mechanic into a negative light (don't even get me started on third party programs that can make both setups close to automatic).
One thing that I have always found humorous is number of "nerf damage" threads that show up, but seldom do you see threads about "nerf resists". I can put out a lot of spike damage, especially when fully buffed, and a couple of spacebar presses can deliver anywhere from 30k-75k (depending on if the gods are smiling on me), but when I get into matches where after attacking three different opponents for almost a minute with every available TAC buff running, and I look and see that my total damage is under 20k, then everyone on the opposing side has stacked resists, and there really is no point in playing, as they have damage completely nerfed even before buffs and BO resists are applied. As much as there is wrong/an issue with spike damage, there is also a problem with resist stacking with items and gear that would also need to be addressed, to keep from a situation where damage is lowered all around, and create truly invincible opponents.
Long post.....sorry for my rambling. Though a couple quick thoughts that occurred to me after reading adjudicatorhawk's post.
Also you need to take into consideration how long the fight lasts.... Long drawn out space battles are boring.....
My character Tsin'xing
I support somthing like this.
*In PvP the ship injuries should take place during combat and not at death (as in PvE).
*Injuries should only be fixable when out of combat. Not sure if it should be the standard way to fix injuries or maybe using Doffs assignments.
*Unlike above, injuries should stay on ship after respawn. That way you can't just kill yourself to fix all you injuries.
But a mechanic that causes automatic shield distribution to be a potential tactical liability would be very interesting. The game sort of does this now, but I don't think it does it in the way I'd like to see.
Say you're taking damage on the front shield. Assume that in order to reinforce that shield, you have to weaken the right and left (power comes from adjacent shields). Now when they weaken, they would draw power away from the rear shield. Since the rear shield is feeding two shields instead of one, it would deplete faster.
Currently, I believe shield redistribution draws power from all of the other shields equally. There's no "balancing flow" that I'm aware of. I could be mistaken.
Where this gets interesting is when more than one shield facing is getting hit at about the same time.
If the front and right shields are hit, the system needs to be smart enough to know that it can't drain the right shields to feed the front. Instead, the front shield would siphon more energy from the left and the right shield would siphon more energy from the rear.
If the front and rear shields are hit, each of them would siphon off a share from the right and left shields, depleting them faster.
If you managed to hit the front, right, and left shields all at once, it could create a cascading effect that siphons a lot of energy from the rear shield in order to strengthen the other three.
The idea here is to bring shield melting tactics into play where you're trying to target specific shields to make the ship's shield allocation work against it and soften a particular shield through shield distribution and force a shield to deplete faster than it can be regenerated.
The problem with any kind of automatic shield distribution is that it works against the idea that I can choose which shield ought to be reinforced. It's passively reactive instead of proactive.
Shield resistance also seems like more of an all-or-nothing mechanic. You either have it or you don't. There's no sense that a stronger shield provides more resistance than a weak shield or that a weak shield permits more bleedthrough.
It's a tough problem. I don't envy the Devs the task of making it both more challenging for the veterans and more accessible to less-experienced PvP'ers.
Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
...it seems one of the big problems with sto combat is the fact that shields via tac team are just too good - so we could either
a) remove automatic distribution - but this would make spike damage even more powerful
b) increase the base redistribution rate per press of 'redistribute' - thus making tac team less needed for all ships
c) give all teams auto redistribution - balance by saturation
d) reassign distrubution to the other teams and take it off tac team to make auto distribution more viable to more builds - simultaneously oblitering the shield tank component most escorts utillise
e) drastically lower the auto redistribution rate so instead of the 'four sides=one side', its more limited to two
or
f) an idea that occured to me - give ships a hybrid aux/power power based auto redistribution rate (why both? to defeat the power of the a2b granting 125 shield for a long uptime) but on top of this; bring a 'stun' mechanism to the party via torpedos
Currently, due to distributed shields torpedos are pretty weak, barely able to hit hull - thus how about we put that massive kinetic energy to use and make it have a secondary use as a auto-redistribute stun of half second per torp? thus with auto-redistribute taken off tac team and powered by aux/shield, theres a viable way to have a decent 'time to kill' - and a;phas cannot truely benefit as the slow speed of the torp versus energy weapons means the energy damage will hit and be partially redistibuted before the stun incurred
in this manner, cruisers and such will be able to inflinct meaningful damage yet attackers will retain an alpha capability
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
The Freelancer server that I play on kind of does this, with much simpler overall systems. In a slugger match between 2 ships of the same class, it only takes a couple of minutes for one of them to drain the opponent's reserves. If they dont go toe-to-toe directly, and do things like break off to let shields recharge, then the fight will drag out for a much longer time. Fighter combat typically stretches out a lot longer than capital class combat, because fighters can break out of combat much easier.
Bringing it back on subject, the first question that has to be answered is if we (or rather, they) want a run-and-gun game like COD or a deeper combat game like MechWarrior. What we have now is something with the complexity of the latter but with fights that feel like the former. Right now all kills are spray-and-pray and headshots, no attrition at all. I would much rather play a mechwarrior kind of game [not talking about the newer MW MMOs] where you pound on a subsystem or force it to overheat etc. Freelancer lets you blow the engines and guns off the ship, so over time even if you dont kill them directly you can eventually stop them from running and fighting, and then kill them.
STO is nothing like that. STO is a SP PVE game with some MP PVP made available. The numbers reflect it.
Think of a PvP vet that can kill 3 or 4 people before he/she gets enough injuries to be removed from combat. So they let themselves be killed and are back in the fight in 30 seconds, just to kill another 3 or 4 and repeat. Versus, them having to step back from the fight and heal their injuries for a minute or two before getting back in the fight. Giving the other team a change to get caught up.
However I do not like the whole respawn system anyway.
Unfortunately, crew right now isn't so important to PvP because of how little it actually contributes to combat. Merely adding a bonus to hull regeneration and subsystem repair time isn't usually worth the trouble of slotting biofunction monitors and emergency force fields in place of other consoles. Your crew effectively becomes nothing more than a bunch of redshirts that aren't necessary for the functioning of your ship.
Why don't we revamp the crew mechanic in STO to provide this "combat fatigue" we're looking for? Tying crew levels in to combat performance would provide an excellent way of enforcing "combat endurance", as well as resurrecting a heretofore neglected mechanic. Here's what I'd suggest:
- When your crew is all active (crew is all white), you hit and heal for 100% of your normal values.
- When your crew is all disabled (crew is all orange), your damage and healing is cut by 50%.
- When your crew is all dead (crew is all black), you are nearly crippled and only hit/heal for 25% of your normal values.
(Of course, there's a sliding scale between these values. e.g. if 1/2 of the crew bar is white, 1/4 of the crew bar is orange, and 1/4 of the crew bar is black, then you'd be operating at 50% * 100% + 25% * 50% + 25% * 25% = 68.75% effectiveness.)- When your crew is all active, your power levels function at 100% of your normal values.
- When your crew is all disabled, your effective power levels are cut in half.
- When your crew is all dead, your effective power levels are only 25% of what they normally are.
This would leave projectile weapons and aux-independent heals open as options, while also tying shield regeneration and ship speed in to crew levels.If we implement combat endurance/fatigue via the crew mechanic like this, what do we get? Lots of good things!
- Cruisers and other ships with high crew pools will be able to stay at peak performance in combat far longer than escorts and other ships with tiny crew numbers; their combat style will usually be to stay in the thick of it and keep pressure on the enemies to capitalize on the fact that they can keep going while others can't.
- Escorts and other ships with small crew pools will see their combat performance drop much faster. This will enforce a hit-and-run combat style for the escorts, going in for the hit and then retreating to recover disabled/dead crew.
Of course, because low-crew ships are usually far more maneuverable than high-crew ships, this can lead to interesting combat tactics: a pair of escorts can tag-team a cruiser, keeping the cruiser in red alert while they swap in and out of combat, slowly wearing down the cruiser while keeping themselves at high effectiveness.I really think that tying crew in to effectiveness would provide a great combat endurance system, one that's easy to see and understand while in combat while providing interesting tactical opportunities and strategies to exploit. Plus, it would rescue a long-neglected mechanic and make it function prominently in the the ebb and flow of battles.
I'd want the ability to shut such a mechanism off too. I prefer to fly nimble ships and I will often distribute shields to a side facing I'm going to bank toward. The time I most want an auto distribute (ie TT) when flying strait into a high damage volley(s).
Not to be a smart TRIBBLE, but don't a lot of people bind distribute shields to space bar?
Imo, the issue w/the live by the sword die by the sword spike builds is more that the dieing part doesn't happen enough for ships that should be more fragile. Getting into the why's would probably derail more than it should.
Random Quote from Kerrat
"Sumlobus@****: your mums eat Iced Targ Poo"
C&H Fed banter
/bind space "GenSendMessage HUD_Root FirePhasers $$ +power_exec Distribute_Shields"
/bind space "GenSendMessage HUD_Root FireTorps $$ +power_exec Distribute_Shields"
/bind space "GenSendMessage HUD_Root FireAll $$ +power_exec Distribute_Shields"
Maybe with some +TrayExecByTray action mixed into it...
/bind space "+TrayExecByTray 9 0 $$ +TrayExecByTray 9 1 $$ +TrayExecByTray 9 2 $$ +TrayExecByTray 9 3 $$ GenSendMessage HUD_Root FireAll $$ +power_exec Distribute_Shields"
Etc, etc, etc...
/bind space "GenSendMessage Game_Root DoStuffForMe!"
I'm still trying to figure out how Lesser means Greater with the crew loss that they do...
...and hey, they haven't neglected crew!
Bio-Molecular Torps! They came up with new and interesting ways to get rid of crew.
Systems Designer - Cryptic Studios
Twitter: @JeffAHamilton